Part of the Kansas City-based company's vision involves tapping into short-form animated videos, and it's kicking off that initiative with a GoComics Short Shorts Animation Contest open to the U.S. and Canada.

"We've seen lots of really great work all around the web in various places, but there's no home for it," Andrews McMeel CEO Andy Sareyan said during a previous interview. "What we're talking about doing is reinventing the whole idea of comics and cartoon strips for the next century with sight, sound and motion."

If we are all "Charlie" in the wake of an armed assault on the offices of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, no one has earned that solidarity more than political cartoonists. A left-leaning cartoonist and his conservative counterpart weigh in on the risks and rewards of taking a bold stance. In the course of doing a job intended to provoke, are there lines they do not cross?